"Oh,
come on Frank! This is a highly organized, riot-trained Army. You
can't tell me that they're unable to hold the perimeter on a small
town through early morning."

Long neglected since its release in 1973, George A. Romero's
The Crazies is finally getting
its due on home video. Released just as Night
of the Living Dead was starting to gain much of the
critical momentum that it has today, the film was unable to cash in
on the film's success and therefore achieved only a very brief
theatrical run. It was then dumped to home video with a couple of
poor VHS releases (most recently a fuzzy full-frame release from
Anchor Bay) that left much to desire. With the increased media
attention that biological warfare has gained in the last few years,
and the American release of Danny Boyle's similarly themed
28 Days Later, it was perhaps
inevitable that the film would receive a new release, the question
is how well does it fare?

Almost relentless in its build-up, The
Crazies starts innocently enough with a young boy
playfully scaring his sister. The scene quickly turns dark however,
with the discovery of a rampaging father and a dead mother. As the
family's house burns, the opening credits roll and the film begins
its sprint to its inevitable conclusion. By the time the credits are
done rolling, the military has arrived and begins the process of
investigating the situation (the leak of a biological weapon into
the ground water) and containment of the townspeople, a small group
of which figure out what is happening and try to escape...

Much like its predecessor NotLD,
The Crazies is basically an
examination of social conformity in response to a loosely defined
crisis. In this case the crisis is a 'bacteriological weapon,'
codename "Trixie," which slowly causes a psychosis in the
population that is frequently violent and always incapacitating.
When the military is called in, and hysteria begins to build in the
town (in both the civilians and military personnel), it becomes
increasingly more difficult to distinguish those people that are
infected from those who are just angry and trying to survive.

As the film progresses, our identification shifts from the military
personnel, who provide us with the necessary exposition, to a group
of civilians on the run and slowly going mad. The military becomes
increasingly cold, bureaucratic, and zombie-like - all dressed in
the same white contamination suits, they become nameless faceless
beings stealing everything in sight and killing (or being killed)
seemingly indiscriminately. Meanwhile, the townspeople are similarly
becoming a 'like-minded' mass of killers as they succumb to Trixie.
The key distinction between the two groups, and a central theme in
the film, is that the townspeople are victims of Trixie/conformity,
whereas the military is just following orders and therefore
willingly conforming.

The film is quite successful in dealing with its story, what most
of us really want to know, in the end, is "Is it scary?"
All I can say is, it depends on what you expect. If you're expecting
the gore bombs that are the Dead
films (especially Dawn of the Dead)
you'll probably be disappointed. Although it has some gore, the film
is really quite restrained and very tame by today's standards. Do
you want to be jumping out of your seat every 5.4 minutes? You
won't. But if you compare The Crazies
to other Hollywood attempts at the subject matter, like
Outbreak, then it seems
downright scary. The film truly succeeds and hits closer to home
because its 'heroes' (if we can call them that) are the average
victims, not the scientists/doctors fighting the disease, nor the
soldiers trying to contain it. The limitations of the budget and
inexperience of the filmmakers do show (as they do in most early
Romero films), but the film transcends these problems and the end
result is a creepy film that was obviously a labor of love, not the
product of endless development meetings.

On the technical side, Blue Underground has presented
The Crazies in what they claim
to be 1.66:1 anamorphic widescreen. The actual framing appears to be
tighter, but compositions don't seem to suffer for it and overall
looks pretty good. The transfer is utilitarian, but is such a
drastic improvement over all previous fuzzy home video releases that
I've seen that it is difficult to be disappointed. Colors are well
represented and blacks are nice and deep, although the limitations
of the source materials are present (dirt, grain, etc.). Compression
overall is good, with no distracting artifacts and a very fine grain
which is evident throughout and was actually much more subdued than
I was expecting to see. Overall, it's a nice film-like transfer,
which is far from perfect, but pleasing nonetheless. The sound
option is a thick mono, representative of a low budget film of its
day. For the most part, voices are clear, but they do get muddled
when there is a lot going on. But it's nothing to get too excited
about.

The extras, while slim, are a nice addition to the package. First
up is a commentary track with George Romero interviewed by Blue
Underground's Bill Lustig. The two seem very comfortable and jovial
with one another and provide a well-balanced and informative track
covering both technical details and behind the scenes anecdotes,
definitely shouldn't be missed. Next up is a short featurette titled
The Cult Film Legacy of Lynne Lowry,
which is light, yet still entertaining interview with one of the
film's stars, who appeared in a series of low budget films in the
late 60's early 70's (including Radley Metzger's
Score and David Cronenberg's
Shivers). Rounding out the
extras are a pair of anamorphicaly enhanced trailers, a couple of TV
spots, an impressive stills gallery containing over 200 images, and
a George Romero bio, which is surprisingly lengthy.

In the end, it is a nice package of a film that has been overlooked
for too long, and aged incredibly well. It is certainly not the
prettiest disc on the block, but it's probably the best this film is
going to look and sound barring a pricey, and unlikely at this
point, restoration.